Here, you are urged and encouraged to run your mouths about something important.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

COULD WIKILEAKS END HILLARY'S POLITICAL CAREER

You know it's bad when a very liberal website calls for Hillary Clinton to step down from her role as Secretary of State because of the Wikileaks cables. While the leaked documents may be damaging to the United States, they may also lead to the downfall of Hillary Clinton at a time when many have been seeing her stock rise toward a challenge to Barack Obama in 2012.

To be fair to Clinton, she isn't the first secretary of state to issue cables telling U.S. foreign service officers to spy on other diplomats. According to the leaked diplomatic cables, Condoleezza Rice likewise instructed State Department diplomats to collect such intelligence, and I wouldn't be surprised if previous secretaries of state encouraged if not instructed their diplomats to push information-collection all the way to intelligence-gathering.

But what makes Clinton's sleuthing unique is the paper trail that documents her spying-on-their-diplomats-with-our-diplomat orders, a paper trail that is now being splashed around the world on the Web and printed in top newspapers. No matter what sort of noises Clinton makes about how the disclosures are "an attack on America" and "the international community," as she did today, she's become the issue. She'll never be an effective negotiator with diplomats who refuse to forgive her exuberances, and even foreign diplomats who do forgive her will still regard her as the symbol of an overreaching United States. Diplomacy is about face, and the only way for other nations to save face will be to give them Clinton's scalp.

The Slate piece closes with this assessment:

There is no way that the new WikiLeaks leaks don't leave Hillary Clinton holding the smoking gun. The time for her departure may come next week or next month, but sooner or later, the weakened and humiliated secretary of state will have to pay.

If Hillary is shamed out of being Secretary of State, how on earth can she still be an effective president?